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India is rapidly realizing this Many location-specific natural hazards Each of the challenges it faces involves a rapidly evolving risk landscape. These risks are a combination of weather events, the vulnerabilities of local populations and their exposure. Risks are best managed and mitigated with well-planned responses. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) deserves praise for its response to disasters and helping to reduce the mortality and damage caused by them. But it also faces many knowledge gaps and barriers to improving its operations to meet India’s need to be weather-ready and climate-resilient.
Never stop surprising
Most areas of India are now expected to experience extreme weather events in all seasons, including heatwaves, forest fires, heavy rainfall, landslides, droughts and cyclones. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) tries to keep pace by improving its forecasts of all meteorological hazards, even if they are not local (in scale) enough to plan disaster responses. Skills can always be improved.
Academic institutions and government research facilities play a key role in advancing process and forecast understanding and improving forecasts. They continue to develop and implement new approaches to down-sample global, coarse-resolution forecasts to hyperlocal scales for specific regions.
Climate change is locally manifested as trends of cooler and warmer temperatures in north-central and peninsular India, respectively. But this does not mean we are spared from heatwaves. Similarly, rainfall peaks now occur not only during the monsoon season of June to September but also during the pre- and post-monsoon periods. As a result, landslides are more frequent on poorly supported ground. Increased incidences of forest fires have also been reported.
made worse by extreme weather conditions
Vulnerability is not entirely natural.
India’s population and economic growth has led to people moving into more vulnerable areas and building informal housing on unstable slopes and in flood-prone areas. The more attractive of these locations have attracted more tourists, which in turn has led the state to establish more infrastructure in these locations and encourage other economic activities, such as replacing forest area with cash crops and plantations.
The recent landslide in Wayanad has created such a situation A dangerous mix of factors On full display.
Overall, vulnerability is a combination of poverty and high population density, poor infrastructure in some places and wealth and unsafe development in other places. Insurance coverage and/or policies can also create a moral hazard by encouraging people to increase their exposure to climate risks.
ineffective translation
India continues to invest heavily in climate research, forecasting, and climate services. Climate services translate forecasts into information that supports decision-making in agriculture, water and energy resources, healthcare, transportation, and other sectors. But use of this information has been remarkably low because it is either not as location- or region-specific as it should be or there are not enough people with the right skills to use it.
Academia and several private enterprises continue to push the boundaries of translating IMD forecasts to hyperlocal scales and improving skills to provide value-added products for users. Even when specific products are created at the required scale and skill-level, operationalizing them or providing them in a timely and regular manner remains a major hurdle. Two examples illustrate this problem.
(i) Irrigation related advice: Weather forecasts are often converted into field-level information for irrigation management for 1 to 5 days and water regime information for up to 14 days. Experts combine information on farmers’ irrigation practices with data on soil properties, crop type, water needs and crop stress to determine whether there is enough water for irrigation and what the schedule should be, from rainfall forecasts.
The authors were part of a similar decision-support tool developed for grape farmers in Nashik district.
Development of this solution in collaboration with farmers has shown that up to 30% water can be saved without any loss in crop yield in both Kharif and Rabi seasons.
Now, there is a need to operationalise it at a larger scale: farmers need to use this tool to document the usefulness and utility of irrigation advice over a few years, so that the tool can be improved. It is planned as an app where farmers can access the data and provide continuous feedback to researchers. Researchers can use this feedback to update the tool for other regions and other crops.
But involving large numbers of farmers and developing apps requires the involvement of local governments, NGOs and farmer organisations or cooperatives. This can be seen as the purview of extension agencies that – if they exist – can translate research into daily, weekly and seasonal agricultural work.
Yet such bodies do not exist nor are we educating/training people to staff them. We also lack the financing structures needed to set up programmes from research to operation. Also unmet is the need to assist poor farmers with the soil moisture and crop data they need to plan irrigation. Without these systems and skills, any plan to double farmers’ incomes or ensure a minimum income for them will be impossible.
(ii) Urban flood forecasting: For flood control, we need to down-scale heavy rainfall predictions to street-level in cities. Currently, municipalities are doing this with inputs from municipal sensors and data from their weather stations.
However, the ideal situation is as follows: flood managers need to evaluate the forecast for a few seasons to ensure that the forecast can be implemented at a reduced scale, and then plan the allocation and operation of drainage pumps, traffic control units, bus/train routes, school closures, etc.
In this instance, flood managers must be trusted employees of a government, NGO, or private entity who monitor forecasts and their systematic biases, as well as human actions that exacerbate flooding.
Again, neither the academic system nor the structure of urban governments allows us to fully apply the forecasts to urban flood management and flood risk reduction.
From research to operations
Climate research is currently so limited that it cannot inform operations within a reasonable time-frame. Its goal was once research papers and PhDs, but now it needs to serve the needs of people by bringing science to society. Governments and disaster management agencies depend on it. We clearly need sector-specific extension agents as described above to link research and administrative enterprises. These agents will serve as the link to co-develop effective solutions to make India climate-ready.
In fact, climate-readiness and climate-resilience Must be hyperlocal Because the nation will only be as prepared and resilient as its weakest link. This requires the continued funding of the necessary research-to-operations systems in every location and every region.
We also need to pay serious attention to capacity building, i.e. training area-specific extension agents who can communicate in local languages and manage the impacts of cultural peculiarities on disaster management and risk reduction.
If this seems a daunting task, remember that it is also necessary – to ensure that India’s growth is sustainable and protects everyone, including from the impacts of climate change.
Raghu Murtugudde is a Professor at IIT Bombay and Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland.
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